Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Schocked, schocked.

Chancellor Merkel and the fine journalists at Axel Springer's Bild-Zeitung are schocked, schocked, that some of the nation's paid killers have been having fun with dead bodies.

In 1999, Wiglaf Droste ended up in court for repeating Kurt Tucholsky's simple truth: that Soldiers are murderers. Here, he asks the pertinent question: What should we call them instead, then? Fax machines? Tennis rackets?

3 comments:

off topic but more, very incoherent ,anti conspiracy drivel from the 'subscriber only' edition of counterpunchAlexander cockburn seems to think its bad people are interested in something he finds distasteful and then it peters out into, well see for yourself:I complained to Chomsky recently that our inbox was overflows with measured abuse from the 9/11-conspiracycrowd. (A sample of their reasoned discourse as embodied in title of email to me: “F–ing Idiot, Bush-enabling Troll.”) Has the left ever been in worse shape, I asked.Chomsky responded cheerfully that he’s not “quite that pessimistic”, that his sense is that “the potential left is growing fast”. He recounted having given a few talks in the Cambridge/Boston area and that “it’s quite differentfrom before”. He was just back from an evening on the Cuban Five and U.S. terror against Cuba. “A big crowd, very enthusiastic”.Chomsky also said he had given several talks in the last few weeks on the Middle East. Now, these were of the sort of events – I remember that periodwell myself – that used to require police protection in Cambridge only a few years ago. Now? Chomsky said he’d got an occasional sad question asking whether he was being too hard on Israel because it really has security problems.“Maybe I’m feeling a little dour today,” I wrote back to Chomsky. On Saturday, October 8, I drove into Eurekato speak at an antiwar rally. I asked one of the organizers – one I knew to be keen on the 9/11-conspiracy scenarios – whether this was planned as basically a convocation.The inviter said, “No. Maybe one speaker on 9/11.” I went along, to the parking lot north of the jail in the middle of town. There were about 200 people. It was a glorious day.Speaker number one was the chairperson,many days into a fast . He told the crowd that he was a 9/11-conspiracy convert . The war in Iraq didn’t get much of a mention in his address. Speaker #2 was also a 9/11-conspiracy advocate. He gave a long, incomprehensible speech, whose main effect was to cut the crowd by about a third.The only audible bit of his allocution was a denunciation of Alexander Cockburn.He also barely mentioned the war in Iraq. Speaker #3, an academic, read a lengthy speech loaded with refined ironiesabout Bush. I don’t know whether he mentioned the war because two young people, one with a button saying, “9/11 was an inside job,” were beginning to harangueme while he was talking. Speaker #4 was my neighbor here in Petrolia,David Simpson, who announced he was a global warming cultist and spoke briefly on that theme.I was the final speaker. It had been over two hours, and the crowd is much depleted. I said, “we are united by one common desire: LUNCH.” Big applause. I talked about the war, about 9/11/73, the coup against Allende in Chile, as the starting gun for the Empire’s counterattackamid defeat in Vietnam. I talked about the current political situation and even the prime story of the hour – unmentionedhitherto – the Foley scandal, which may well turn the House of Representativesover to the Democrats. Let’s hope so. We need gridlock. My speech went down well with the 70 or so survivorsin the parking lot.A friend, George Corsetti, wrote to me from Detroit that on that same Saturday he’d gone to a “World Can’t Wait” demo that “started at Wayne State with about 50 people. They marched around the campus denouncing Bush et al on a megaphone, grew to about 75 people. They left campus, marched to a high school just getting out at 4 p.m., picked up another 25. They drove the cops crazy as they kept zigzagging down Woodward. They marched about 4 milesto downtown and held a rally. Thousands of people saw them and got literature about the war. Lots of horn blowing and no one gave us the finger.”In other words, an antiwar rally in Detroit mustered about a hundred people.Corsetti added that the “interesting thing about the demo was that there were more than a few physically attractive in the crowd, men and women. Same thing happened in the late 60s, as the counterculturebrought in more people and antiwar sentiment/demos became more mainstream. Time is on our side.”Tony Judt, the NYU prof and liberalwriter for the New York Review of Books , has just discovered some of the consequences of publicly criticizing Israel. Here’s a message he released on October 4:“I was due to speak this evening, in Manhattan to a group called Network 20/20 comprising young business leaders, NGOs , academics, etc. from the U.S. and many countries. Topic: the Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The meetings are always held at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan.“I just received a call from the Presidentof Network 20/20. The talk was cancelledbecause the Polish Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League. Serial phone-calls from ADL President Abe Foxman warned them off hosting anything involving Tony Judt. If they persisted, he warned, he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Israeli anti-Semites (= me) all over the front page of every daily paper in the city (an indirect quote). They caved, and Network 20/20 were forced to cancel.Whatever your views on the Middle East, I hope you find this as serious and frightening as I do. This is, or used to be, the United States of America.”Judt’s disclosure elicited a few stories,including one in the Washington Post by Michael Powell, who wrote, “The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling. ‘This is serious and frightening, and only in America – not in Israel – is this a problem,’ he said. ‘These are Jewishorganizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with them on leadtheMiddle East away from anyone who might listen.’“The leaders of the Jewish organizationsdenied asking the consulate to block Judt’s speech and accused the professor of retailing ‘wild conspiracy theories’ about their roles. But they applauded the consulate for rescinding Judt’s invitation.“‘I think they made the right decision,’said Abraham H. Foxman, nationaldirector of the Anti-Defamation League. ‘He’s taken the position that Israel shouldn’t exist. That puts him on our radar.’”It’s good that Judt is making a fuss about the ghastly Foxman, but I do have to smile wryly at his sudden discovery that criticizing Israel can be an edgy business. Actually, it was far, far riskier twenty or even ten years ago. It’s much easier now, as Chomsky indicated in his note to me and as Jeffrey St. Clair and I have found with talks promoting our book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.Not so long ago, when Chomsky went to a town to talk, the ADL would trail him and file minute by minute reports on his movements and statements. Someone once sent him anonymously one such dossier. On the front page of the Xerox was written, “for Alan Dershowitz.” Chomsky told me long ago that he and Dershowitz were scheduled to have a debate in a week or so, and evidently this was being sent to Dershowitz, for him to cull the usual slanders and lies.The ADL had spies everywhere, who were sending back to the ADL feverish reports, mostly hysterical fabrications, about what they claimed to have heard in meetings. That was a joke. Not a joke was what happened at UCLA and Cambridgewhere there were undercover cops at Chomsky’s meetings because they’d picked up serious threats. And that was nothing compared what Edward Said had to live with. Or Norman Finkelstein. What Judt faces isn’t more than a tiny fraction of what Norman faces regularly – e.g., being condemned by the Progressive(sic) as a Holocaust denier or by its editor as a “Holocaust minimizer” on the grounds that he accurately quoted Raul Hilberg. Norman has been attacked in similar terms or worse by others who are pretentiously protesting Judt’s treatment.

Thanks very much, paul. Please do keep posting these if and when you have the time. (Do you actually have to type them all out?)

Cockburn: "(A sample of their reasoned discourse as embodied in title of email to me: “F–ing Idiot, Bush-enabling Troll.”) Has the left ever been in worse shape, I asked."

The irony of it. I think his correspondent was more justified in asking that question. Cockburn spends months castigating anyone who questions The Bush Gang Farrago as "kooks" and "nuts", then he complains piteously when people angrily call him a Bush-Enabler. Sad stuff indeed.